Libby Broadbent's Blog, page 11

The nylons didn’t last the evening, either…

Ah, the staff Christmas Party.

How I love thee.

It heralds the end of the difficult downhill run to the Christmas holidays, it presages the final week of desperate effort to keep the students focused, it allows me to wear something sparkly, it’s an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, and ultimately, a happy opportunity to drink inappropriate amounts of holiday cheer with my co-workers.

Did I mention… an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet? Fa la la la la.

But, it is also yet another event designed to throw that wrench of social stress into an already stressy season. Drinking with ones co-workers is best done in moderation. I remember a Staff Party of Christmas Past when I introduced myself to a co-worker’s husband by telling him I had six-inch nipples from nursing my four children. I hope to avoid these kinds of disturbing revelations this year.

To this end, I have two glasses of wine during the preparation phase of the evening.

I don’t own anything sparkly. Thus, getting dressed for social events is a challenge.

I own teacher clothes.

And, because I teach Art, all of my teacher clothes are speckled in varying degrees with a rainbow of paint and glue and smears of mystery fluid that looks like it might be snot.

But I am undaunted!

I will be dressy!

I don’t get to dress up very often, because it is an arduous foray into the dark recesses of my closet, and my psyche, which usually results in overpowering makeup and nylon runs. This year, I promise myself, I will not look like a whore.

Knowing that hookers probably have mystery smears on their clothes also, I already feel I’m losing the race.

I waxed my eyebrows today, in preparation. This means my eyelids are a vivid pink, and I am missing several clumps of essential eyelashes, and the big wrinkle at the corner of my eye is sticking itself together like a sticky child’s mouth so I have to keep grimacing to unglue it. It looks like I’m winking, which I’m sure is alluring.

I bought new nylons.

I decide to wear my little black skirt, which actually belongs to my youngest daughter who is six inches shorter than me and thirty pounds lighter, but I have a blazer to cover any unsightly bulges. I put on the blazer, and decide it’s not festive enough. Much too business-like. Who wears a blazer to a party?

I opt for a flowy sweater instead, but the flowy sweater requires a belt for the tiny skirt. The only belt I can find also belongs to my daughter… or perhaps a biker bitch from the 1960’s. It has… studs.  I wrap it around my middle without bothering with belt loops, just to see what it looks like, and decide that I can totally rock 1960’s biker bitch for my staff Christmas party because I am on glass number three.

The flowy sweater is the one with the mystery smear. And pink paint. I pretend not to notice, and apply a substantial amount of festive cosmetics to my aging visage.

I’ve never been good with eye shadow. Wink, wink. My sticky wrinkle now has crusty eye shadow adhered to the eyebrow waxing residue. Alluring just dropped several notches to disturbing.

Feeling good about the degree of coverage being supplied by my concealer, I take a look in the mirror… that’s weird. There are strange marks on my tiny skirt. Since it’s too tight to actually bend over and inspect the offending blotches, I thrust my pelvic region at the full length mirror and wipe off dots of peachy colored something.

More appears.

I am bemused.

I wipe again.

There are now random dark wet stains across the front of the tiny skirt, like I am perhaps leaking from some embarrassing area of my anatomy, but the peachy blotches keep appearing, as if by magic.

Ah. Concealer. I wonder for a moment if it’s dripping off my face, but no. Fingers. I wash. It’s all good.

I inspect myself in the mirror and realize that the studded biker belt seems oddly out of place, in a Rebel Warrior Princess kind of way, without some corresponding metal on my upper half. So, I fish around for an appropriate necklace. I find a silver monster I can barely lift from the jewellery basket and somehow manage to bench press it up to my neck. I’m stooping a little, but I figure I just need to totter into the restaurant and then I can somehow wedge myself up against the buffet table, and the necklace will help to anchor me in place.

All-You-Can-Eat Buffet.

You have no idea how exciting this is.

I second-guess the wisdom of the tiny skirt, but the only other option is the yoga pants my daughters have suggested aren’t really very professional looking. The flowy sweater will cover my belly as it expands.

I am cool.

I find my heels and take one last glimpse in the mirror before I totter out to where my drive awaits.

Silver necklace, combined with biker-bitch belt, tiny skirt, and spiky heels…

I look like a whore.

My drive honks in the driveway.

I’m off to enjoy a stress-free staff Christmas Party.

It is only on my way across the gravel to lurch into the back seat that I realize I haven’t put my scary belt through the belt loops, and now my tiny skirt is in dire risk of riding up around my hips in a most awkward manner.

Perhaps no one will notice the mystery smear after all.

 

 

Woooba woooba…

When I woke up on the morning of my fortieth birthday, my back hurt. It had never hurt before. My eyes suddenly didn’t work, either.

Blurry. Never been blurry before.

Then it was my hips. My elbows.

Jowls started growing.

I removed a distressingly long whisker from my chin which had not been there the night before.

I think I had a hot flash.

All before getting out of bed on my fortieth birthday. My body had aged overnight.

That was six years ago.

Strangely enough, I have continued aging. Every day. One day closer to death.

Between my blurry eyes and that first whisker, and today: I got divorced, lost twenty pounds, started running, dated a bit, kept running, met the Man of my Dreams, started eating a lot of sour cream and butter… pretty much every meal has cheese, sour cream,  gravy, crème: you name it. If I can put butter in it, it’s gonna happen… I slowed down on the running, published a book, grew an empty nest, and began gaining weight in an alarming and distressingly voluptuous manner.

I don’t mean voluptuous in the good way. These lady lumps ain’t pretty. Ain’t no one ready for this jelly! I mean voluptuous in the gelatinous way.

And, since I am no longer twenty… or even thirty-nine… my fatty bits are migrating. I used to put a bit of weight on my thighs, my ass, my boobs. But now?

Belly.

And the flabby bits above my hips. The back fat that I can feel wobbling as I walk down the hall.

Back fat I pinched in the ab machine at the gym. I’m serious. I have bruises.

Back fat bruises easily.

Woooba wooooba wooooba.

Helicopter landing? Hippos wading out of the Mersey?

No. Ms. Broadbent rushing to first class.

So I have decided, with the supportive insistence of my friends, that it’s time to hit the gym. Like a geriatric whale at low tide.

I am intimidated. Totally.

My belly is a solid thunk of flesh that sits on my lap like a small round creature afraid of the sun. I try to cover it with baggy clothes. I try to tuck it into my panties.

They aren’t big enough.  And trust me, extra large is… large.

Woooba woooba woooba.

My friends… all gorgeous, accomplished, fashionable women with coordinated outfits and flowing locks… and I go to the gym and get the tour from the incredibly tiny gym woman. The one with a six pack.

I have a keg.

Her legs are as big around as my pinkie. I could snap her like a twig.

My back fat got pinched in the ab machine. I can’t crunch all the way without squeezing my belly roll until it makes gurgling noises of resistance and defiance in the face of this new idea of… exercise. “Don’t crunch me,” I can hear it wheeze. “Just fill me with that cream cheese dip you make with the chicken and sour cream. They we’ll both be happy!”

And, there are people at the gym. Skinny people. How come none of them get stuck in the ab machine and have to be rescued by the Jaws of Life?

And even worse… my students. Teenage boys whom I have anaesthetized with Shakespeare mere hours before, are flexing and sweating and… laughing? At me? Stop that! Detention!

I can’t give you a detention at the gym?

Yes, I am wearing spandex. Stop laughing.

Life is so unfair.

So, to avoid the skinny people and the dangerous machines and the unprofessional inevitability of swearing at my students, I started running with the dog. My Love’s dog, not mine. My dog’s legs are two inches long, and it seems cruel to make him run, especially when he glares at me from his softy cushion in front of the fire and says, in his German accent: Fuck off.

Funny how a weiner dog can be so eloquent when it’s zero degrees outside.

So I run with TK, a long legged Chesapeake. It’s actually quite embarrassing, because while I am gasping and thrusting my mighty Self down the road, certain I am breaking the sound barrier, TK is walking.

Having a dog to run with means that when I come to the end of my limit, which I do several times in the course of my run, I can slow down and walk, crawl, let her drag me home, and if anyone sees us I can pretend it’s all about the dog.

“She needs exercise.”

It’s not about me.

The dog weighs sixty pounds. My left breast weighs sixty pounds. I weighed sixty pounds when I was three.

It’s only gotten worse since then.

So, if you see me and TK running, or if you happen to spy me at the gym, please look the other way. It will be better for both of us, trust me.

What’s that sound, you ask?

Woooba wooooba woooooba.

A helicopter. It’s a fucking HELICOPTER, ok?

Check out my novel: That Thing That Happened:  Available on kindle and kobo

To tweet, or not to tweet?

I’ve had my wrist slapped by twitter.

If I were more of a rebel, or a more confident exploiter of on-line tools, I might have been outraged, but the wrist slapping was actually kind of embarrassing.

“Your account has been suspended for inappropriate use of tweets.”

Was I sexting? No.

Was I spamming? No.

Was I cyber-bullying? No.

Do you realize that none of those above words would have been understood by Shakespeare? Google? Apps? Tweetbank?

What, ho, anon! It cometh as a gentle rain upon my soul of wanderesting woe. I hath been de-twittered, oh fie! Fie, on’t ye beggardly bunions, ye clodswollop of infinitesimal guttersnipes! I bite my thumb at you, twitter! I… bite… my… thumb!

I digress. I’ve been teaching “The Merchant of Venice” and “Othello” to my lovelies at school and the language just oozes into my pores like the light from yonder window…

Twitter.

Apparently, you aren’t supposed to just randomly send tweets to people you don’t know. It’s kind of like showing up at their house and waving your underwear in their living room window.

Apparently.

And if you do unknowingly commit this sacrilege, then they slap you on the wrist and shun you.

Whenever I wrote a blog, over the past few months, I would merrily hasten my eager steps to the twitter page, where I thought the world was my oyster, the computer was my bedfellow, the wayward highways of the world were open and beckoning me forth, “Avast,” I cried. “To Belmont where lies a maiden richly left…”

Yes….

I would troll the twitter categories and merrily tweet my blog to the masses, content in the belief that I was building a fan base for my novel and my writing career. I was pleasant. I was cordial. I never insulted anyone’s mother, or talked politics. I just pressed that magical key: tweet.

No one seemed to mind. Some lovely people even decided, without my asking them, mind you, that they would “follow” me, which resulted in me closing my living room curtains at night, but otherwise warmed the very cockles of my heart.

Then. Out of the blue. Is this a dagger I see before me? Nay, nay, tarry not, hie thee from hence and foreswear thy folly… the twitter Gods said “Nay.”

Actually they didn’t say anything at all, they just aimed their mighty powers of techno-shunning and shut me down.

I’m sorry. I am truly guilty of twitter-badness, and in my ignorance, I apologize.

I feel incredibly guilty of having committed some vile undie-waving violation of privacy.

Ellen DeGeneres, I apologize for my unsolicited tweeting of you. You just seemed so friendly, and cute, and I thought maybe you would like my Fifty Shades posting, and perhaps retweet it to millions, and we could be BFF’s.

Frank Magazine, have I forever created enmity between us? Because I really don’t want you as an enemy.

Salty Ink… I’m sorry. I just really liked your name.

Stonerjesus, you were just really… really… a mistake….

I have been reinstated in the good graces of Twitterdom, but I feel it is a precarious ascent. Like there are rules just beneath the surface of our star-crossed relationship that I have yet to compass ‘round.

I just don’t get it.

“But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ The pretty follies that themselves commit.”  : This, I get. No problemo. Thank you William, Bard of my dreams.

“Hashtag, mention, favorite, tweetbank, friendapolooza, tweetroduce, twitosphere.” :  This, I DO NOT GET!

I’m only forty-five, people! I’m not ninety two! I should get this stuff!

I, apparently and much to my horror, am a twewbie.

Fie… oh, fie on’t!

S’truth, I know not why I am so sad…

I asked my students, who are sixteen and so techno-savvy it’s frightening and my good friend Brandon looked at me with a sympathetic smile and said “You are such a loser.”

He didn’t, actually, but I can read sixteen year old minds easier than I can tweet. Or see the buttons on my cell phone. He tweeted me. I didn’t feel a thing.

“I didn’t feel a thing,” I said.

“Tweet me back,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s legal for teachers to do that. That’s how we get fired,” I said.

“No. Ms Broadbent. Just tweet me. It’s easy,” he said.

I did. I tweeted. Nothing happened. He gave up on me, but I think he still loves me because he assured me that when he fulfills his dream of becoming an LPN he will be kind to me when I am under  his care in a nursing home.

He mentioned diapers.

I live in fear that my pedagogical exploits will come back to kick me… in the ass.

So now, I exist somewhere on the periphery of the technologically twitter-able world… on probation? House arrest? In-school suspension until I figure it out and hashtag my way to fame and fortune?

I think not.  Chaos is come again, and I know not that of which I speak! Oh, how poor are they that know not patience… be patient with me twitter! I am but newly born into a brave new world that has such bizarre new rules in’t!

I will tweet, anon.

To tweet, or not to tweet, that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler on the cell phone to ‘follow’

The slings and arrows of twitterquette and outrageous technology

Or to stand firm in the ignorance of non-tweeting and by opposing end them.

To tweet, to follow, to mention, and by mentioning, twitterpate them…

Aye, there’s the rub!

Wish me luck! 

Check out my novel: That Thing That Happened:  Available on kindle and kobo

The Marriage Monologues: Love, Honor and… wtf?

The Marriage Monologues: Love, Honor and… wtf?.

Do you love technology? Zur.

I cannot keep up with technology.

I teach high school English, which means that my darling wee charges must read BOOKS and discuss SHAKESPEARE and know the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’, as well as being able to hold a pen and occasionally put it to paper to create works of brilliance when the class set of laptops… which numbers seventeen… I have twenty six students… when the seventeen laptops don’t work.

They never ‘don’t work’ all at once. It’s a random ‘don’t work’ thing. We average ten working. On a good day.

Did I mention the TWENTY SIX wee mites destined to send me twitching to my grave over misspellings of ‘our’ and ‘are’?

Anyway.

My students get technology.

They have phones.

Phones that can google. Phones that can calculate. Phones that can GPS. Phones that can find the answer to the question “What’s the difference between a strait and a channel?” which I was asked the other day, and in the time it took me to scratch my head and ponder my dim memory of grade 10 geography a student sitting nearby muttered: “A strait is narrower”.

Me: “Um. How you know dat?”

Her: “Google.”

Me: “You googled…?”

Her: (tucking the cell phone back into the dim recesses of her cleavage) “Yeah.”

Oh.

Ok.

Whatev. Please don’t store your phone there.

My phone can send and receive calls, and it can text. It can also take photos, but I don’t know how to download them, or send them to anyone. I also don’t know how to access my voicemail, or get rid of those weird little icons of tiny people and globes that are on my screen. Sometimes I touch them by accident and things happen and I am forced to turn it off, or pop out the battery to get back to the pristine face of my phone that has the only two items I truly understand.

Call.

Text.

I’m not good at texting, but I enjoy it.

I have that weird T9 thing that predicts the words you are typing, and sometimes, in my flurry of texting and talking and leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, I make boo boos.

My daughter: Mumma… pick up my meds for me please?

Me: Shaking them up tomorrow.

Her: Ok. ROFL. Don’t shake them too hard.

Me: But I have to put them in the mail?

Her: Read your first text mom.

Me: Oh. Ok. Got it. Picking.

Apparently, on a keypad, picking and shaking share the same keys.   So do ‘yup’ and ‘zur’, which is the first syllable of ‘Zurich’, so when I answer in the affirmative to my children, it’s geographical.

Her: You gonna be home soon mumma?

Me: Zurich.

I have students who have these amazing apps that can let them do awesome things. Things that I want to do. But I am afraid of the apps, and the clouds and the angry birds. What is with the angry birds? In Art class, one kid has this cool thing where he can draw with his finger on the screen and it’s like a pencil. He draws the most amazing things… won’t pick up a pencil and do it on paper, mind you, which is the medium I understand, but we’re trying to meet half-way.

Me: “Can you print that, and then try to recreate it in your sketchbook?”

Him: “Why? I did it here.”

Me: “Yeah, but we’re practicing shading, and crosshatching, and control of your pencil…”

Him: “I don’t use a pencil”

Me: “Well, yes, I see that, but…”

He continues to draw an incredibly realistic face, now with blood pouring out of several orifices, and I back away, smiling benevolently…

A lot of my kids are into geo-caching, which is fascinating. Treasure and mapping and GPS and a tiny bundle hidden in a tree behind the Superstore, or under a rock in the local park… It’s wonderful to know they are roaming about, outside, playing… like we used to do with sticks and balls and skipping ropes.

Same thing, maybe? Just… digital?

But it’s disturbing too.

A fellow teacher recently was discussing Anne Frank with a student, explaining how she had to hide, and no one could help her. The student asked why Anne didn’t just text someone and ask for help.

Oh my.

Disturbing. On so many levels.

And, of course, the bullying. The cyber-release of hormones and teenage angst that they can never escape. Some of my kids tell me they don’t sleep well, because they’ll get a text from someone at 2am, and it wakes them.

Turn off the phone?

And if that text is a nasty, hateful, pustulent outpouring of snark?

Block? Delete? Ignore?

What seems like simple answers to me, confounds them.

I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out how to change my ringtone.

I’d like something by Tim McGraw.

I hope I can catch up, and keep current with the techy trends that my kids lap up like a slushy on a hot day. But I doubt I will.

I grew up watching ‘Lorne Green’s New Wilderness’, and ‘The Walton’s’.  I had a huge crush on Captain Kirk, and I was in university the first time I rented a VCR machine and a movie from the local movie store and walked home in the dark with the ten pound machine to watch it on my fifteen inch television.

With popcorn made in a pan. In oil. Slightly burnt.

I remember when McDonald’s cooked their fries in animal fat.

When I was first married, our phone was a party line.

No, children, that doesn’t mean it networked social gatherings on-line. That means that four other houses shared the line, and listened in on your conversations.

I know, I know. You LOL. You may even ROFL.

But you still have to pick up that pen.

There, their and they’re.

Your and you’re.

Get it right.

Zurich.

Check out my novel: That Thing That Happened:  Available on kindle and kobo